What makes a place sacred, and can you find spiritual transformation without traveling thousands of miles? Why do ordinary English villages and Scottish islands continue to draw seekers from around the world? Award-winning travel writer Oliver Smith talks about British pilgrimage sites from Lindisfarne to Iona, and Walsingham to Glastonbury, and how these ancient places still draw even secular pilgrims today.

Oliver Smith is a multi award-winning travel writer and author of The Atlas of Abandoned Places, and On This Holy Island: A Modern Pilgrimage Across Britain.

• The double lives of pilgrimage places, and how ordinary locations can offer transcendent experiences


• Lindisfarne’s tidal causeway


• The tension between commercial tourism and genuine spiritual seeking at sacred sites


• Iona’s remote Scottish island setting and the challenging journey required to reach it


• Walsingham’s remarkable history from medieval powerhouse to modern multicultural pilgrimage destination


• Why Glastonbury might be Britain’s best pilgrimage


• The philosophy of traveling deeper not further, and finding extraordinary meaning in familiar places

You can find Oli at OliverSmithTravel.com

You can find more Pilgrimage Resources here, as well as my book, Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned from Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways.

Transcript of the interview

Jo: Hello Travelers. I’m Jo Frances Penn, and today I’m here with Oliver Smith. Hi Oli.

Oli: Hello, how are you doing?

Jo: Oh, it’s great to have you on the show. Just a little introduction. Oli is a multi award-winning travel writer and author of The Atlas of Abandoned Places, and On This Holy Island: A Modern Pilgrimage Across Britain, which we are talking about today. It’s a fantastic book.

Now, Oli, I wanted to get straight into it. So you say in the book, although you’ve traveled all over the world, you say quote from the book,

“What interested me now were those places that promised a kind of travel beyond what could be charted on an ink or pixel map.”

So I wondered if you could start with that, because you’ve been to all these tick list travel places. What about those that are these soulful journeys?

Oli: I guess what really interests me is that a lot of these places that feature in the book, they sort of live double lives, you know?

If I pick one at random, or one near where you are in the country. If we think about Glastonbury for example, it’s fascinating because people go there with such huge expectation. For some people it’s a place that unlocks other worlds to them. The tor might be a portal to some world of the fairies or some world of Arthurian legend, or it might be something to do with Joseph of Arimathea. Jesus Christ walking in Somerset and that old legend, you know, so much is invested in it.

Yet at the same time, Glastonbury is a place where if you go to the high street, there’s a Boots. There is a pub selling the usual repertoire of lagers and warm beers and Nobby’s Nuts behind the bar, you know, these places. I think all of them, to some degree in the book, they are ordinary, mundane places that people live in and people pass by every day.

But then they offer, they promise a kind of an extra level, which is detectable to some people and isn’t to others. So it is that kind of duality. I think what really interested me when I was writing this book.

Jo: Yeah, and I guess, well it’s almost a bigger question because when you look at your career as a travel writer and you mentioned their expectation, which I think is a fantastic word for so much of travel, you could pick any of the tick list places in the world and say, well, you know, that would be amazing. And then perhaps it’s not.

I always think of Venice because I went to Venice one winter and it flooded and it stank and it was meant to be amazing, but it wasn’t. So I did really just wonder like —

Why write a pilgrimage book when you have traveled so many wonderful places?

Oli: I think one thing that can be said about all the places I’ve visited in this book is that there are places where you learn an awful lot about humanity and the human condition.

People often gravitate to pilgrimage places at these kind of weightless moments of their lives when they’re sort of on a hinge. Perhaps they’ve lost someone who is dear to them. Perhaps they’ve been made redundant. Perhaps they’re looking for direction, they’re going through a rite of passage.

But they are often people who are quick to tell you their story. They’re quick to open their heart. And I found myself getting in such deep and involving and fascinating conversations with people.

I think my pilgrimage book is possibly a little bit different to a lot of the other ones that are out there. It’s not really about me. I’m more of a kind of witness perhaps. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that these places didn’t have some magic that I felt on some level. But I think it is primarily about looking at these 12 places, sort of different characters as well as being character places – they are rich in characters themselves.

So yeah, I think you will have the best conversations if you go to wherever it might be. Walsingham on a pilgrimage day, or Stonehenge solstice or whatever it might be.

Jo: Well one of the places that you went is Lindisfarne and I love that you slept in the rescue box. Now I’ve walked across the sands. It was one of the highlights of the St. Cuthbert’s Way. I had just a wonderful time.

Tell us about the crossing to Lindisfarne

Oli: I think what makes Lindisfarne really interesting is its geography. That tidal element to Lindisfarne is something that’s not entirely unique, because you also get it at St. Michael’s Mount. You also get it at a couple of Holy Islands in the Severn Estuary, I think as well. But on that scale, the idea of taking a walk of three miles across a path that twice a day is completely submerged, is quite a wonderful thing.

And I wrote in the book that I think that path has many lessons. The idea that you only have a finite amount of time. The idea that you need to make the best of that time, that’s something that’s instructive for life on a much bigger level.

But I think probably what’s more interesting is the element of vulnerability there. You know, the idea that you are walking across the sea and the sea will be coming back for you very shortly, and you run the risk every time you step onto that path.

And it’s fascinating how there’s this sort of perpetual drumbeat through the summer of stories of people getting stuck on the causeway. It can be someone who often has got some quite flashy car and they think they can go straight through it. And then they go in the drink sort of halfway across. It’s also quite often people who are from countries where there aren’t tides. So people from central Europe, even the Mediterranean, you know, people sort of drive halfway across the causeway and they think it’s a car parking space, and they go for a little wander and they come back and the sea’s risen again. And suddenly their car is steering wheel deep in water.

But there’s so much biblical symbology in that, you know, the idea of the floods, the idea of the seas parting for Moses. I think all of that kind of echoes very slightly around the Lindisfarne Causeway, both the tarmac road and the Pilgrims Way. I think all those things are important.

I mean, I guess the other thing to say is the start of it all, Saint Aidan chose Lindisfarne because of this tidal rhythm. Because there’s these hours where the island is closed off from the world and the monks there would be in their solitude. They would be praying. And then there are those hours where the door opens in a way and they can go out into the world. They can spread the word. So it’s not an accident that the monastery is situated there.

I think the one thing that is absolutely extraordinary about Lindisfarne that just doesn’t get spoken about enough is that almost every weekend or every other weekend in summer. Maybe that’s a bit too much. Maybe every other weekend or once a m